Tag: Christine M. Janis

Christine Janis received a BA in Natural Sciences from Cambridge, and a PhD in vertebrate Palaeontology from Harvard University. Christine is now a Professor of Evolutionary Biology at Brown University, and describes herself as someone who outgrew neither the horse nor dinosaur phase!

by Christine Janis1
Ladies and gentlemen, I give you tree-kangaroos. These wonderful animals can, in myriad ways, demonstrate the power of evolutionary biology and geology in explaining the patterns we see in modern ecosystems. Here, I want to show how palaeontologists can piece together multiple lines of evidence to understand the evolutionary relationships of fossil and living organisms.
Introduction
First, a little introduction to the tree-kangaroos (genus Dendrolagus). These small, tree-dwelling (‘arboreal’) marsupials live in the rainforests of Australia and New Guinea, and belong to the macropod family of animals, which also includes ground-dwelling kangaroos and wallabies. They grow up to about 80 centimetres long, not including the tail, and mainly eat vegetation (see Fig